Your online store was hit by Panda or Penguin?

Running a very popular blog over at inchoo.net, sometimes a piece of spam comment slips through our radar. When you’re talkign thousands and thousands of comments, there can be lots of spam in them.

Lately, we’ve been getting a lot of e-mails requesting link removals. That is ridiculous. First you spam my site and now you want me to take an effort to remove the links to preserve your rankings? Are you serious? Those links have no follow, I’m not afraid of them, I’ll let them stay and let your spammy website rot in the land of unknown below page one of Google’s SERP.

The time has come for online merchants to face the horrible truth, cheap outsourced SEO services were cheap for a good reason. They were low quality, mindless link building services utilizing the worst spam techniques known to men. I hope you’ll learn not to use such services anymore (although I know that most of you will continue using the cheapest services again and get hit by some future update – again).

Although in most cases you willingly hired a cheap mindless drone to do search engine optimization for your business, sometimes it wasn’t your fault. Sometimes you hired what looked like a legitimate company, payed fair price and they just outsourced the service without even telling you about it. If this is the case, I’m really sorry for you, and I’d love to help you out.

How to know were you hit by Panda or Penguin?

The first Panda update was released on 24th of February 2011. If your organic traffic went donwhill starting this day or the day after, it’s a pretty clear indicator you’ve been hit by Panda. For the date of the rest of the Panda updates – actually for a date of any Google update – just refer to this constantly updated Google Algorithm Change table by SEOmoz.

What’s Panda all about?

This is what Google said:

This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

First launched on 24th of April 2012, this is the main cause of link removal requests that annoy the hell out of every webmaster out there. Penguin is known as “over optimization penalty”, hitting keyword stuffing and unnatural link profile websites a.k.a. websites that outsourced link building to mindless drones.

Cure for Penguin: Link removal outreach (-.-), in a lot of cases changing the domain name and starting your link profile from scratch in a white-hat way.

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